Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema might be the most ravishing of all the Victorian academic painters.  His luminous photo-authoritative images of the ancient world are sensually and historically seductive -- they seem to lay antiquity before us as it might have appeared in real life were we to be magically transported back into it.

In truth his visions are romantic, concentrating as they do on sunny Mediterranean light, color, luxury and spectacle -- but they convince the eye.  His preoccupation with the illusion of spatial depth draws us imaginatively into the scenes he conjures up, gives us a visceral sense of participation in them.

The tradition of the Biblical epic in cinema pursued Alma-Tadema's aims by other means but rarely achieved them with such magnificent authority.  The chariot race in Wyler's Ben-Hur perhaps comes closest to involving us in a vision of the ancient world that possesses a comparable enchantment and illusion of truth.

Wyler, and second-unit director Yakima Canutt, who actually supervised most of the filming of the chariot race, used the tracking shot in spectacular ways to draw us into the cinematic universe of the sequence.  A camera moving through real spaces, photographing real people driving real chariots was a powerful tool, but in a way its very power highlights the effects Alma-Tadema was able to achieve with just paint and canvas.

He was fine painter, as well as a fine storyteller -- the study below gives a good idea of his purely painterly gifts, scarcely inferior to Degas', for example:

The 20th-Century art establishment became suspicious of the meticulous "finish" the academic painters gave their works, but the über-photographic illusion they were after, and the narrative ambitions it served, remain potent and charming.

The spooky, wonderful image above, Duel After A Masked Ball, was painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the great masters of Victorian academic art.  To me, his work aspires to the condition of cinema and can be studied in that regard with great profit.  I think one finds in it, both formally and in terms of subject matter, the reflection of many concerns that would help shape the emerging art of movies.

Gérôme used a photo-authoritative style to make his visions of Oriental scenes and his recreations of historical periods alive and true to viewers who were beginning to process the visual world more and more through the medium of photography.  He was concerned with narrative images and used the illusion of depth to draw the viewer into those images -- the drama of space obsessed him.  He was so concerned with stereometric forms that he also worked regularly as a sculptor.

Though he died in 1904, before movies came into their own as a plastic and narrative medium, he would have thrilled, I think, at their capacity to carry his aesthetic methods into new realms and elaborate them fantastically.

Gérôme's Technicolor über-photographs can seem like frame-grabs from imaginary movies.  You can see the compositional style of Lawrence Of Arabia (and John Ford) in his desert scenes . . .

. . . foreshadowings of Intolerance in his 18th-Century tableaux . . .

. . . the epic visions of De Mille in his Biblical scenes . . .

Griffith, De Mille and Ford would have been familiar with Gérôme directly -- his work was wildly popular and widely reproduced in the time of their youth.  Lean may have echoed Gérôme simply by sharing his formal concerns, though it wouldn't surprise me at all if Lean knew and admired his paintings.  In any case, the profound connection between Victorian academic art and the cinema is nowhere more evident than in the work of this great painter.

To me, the image below of Pygmalion's sculpture Galatea coming to life can serve as a metaphor for the advent of movies, when the aesthetic aspirations of the Victorian academic painter came into fuller life through motion itself.